Vanity brows

The great thing about the beard [R - between hat and shirt] is that I don't need to shave every day. That means I only have to look in the mirror 3 times a month. I know there are other ways to approach this. When O'Manch was wwoofing with us in 2014, he asked in some distress but where is the mirror? because he liked to check himself out every morning to look his best for the day. We'd removed the bath-room mirrors when painting several years before and hadn't put them back again. There's a certain type of person - men and women both - who by reflex glance at their reflection when the pass shop windows. What goes through their minds? "you're lookin' grrrreat, tiger" ?

We had a UK week in mid-August with The Boy and his family. His new engineering firm had recently lost their Man in Singapore and TB volunteered to spend a week out there in a holding action to not lose the two valuable clients. It was short notice but he knew he should look his best and decided that getting his unruly monobrow threaded had to be part of the protocol. You can do it yourself: you just need 60cm of dental floss and two steady thready hands OR, as The Boy chose to do, you can put yourself in the hands of the professionals. He went down-town and into the first shop that seemed appropriate. We all know that women a) are more likely to care about unruly face-hair b) have a higher pain threshold. I think that he was as surprised as everyone in the shop when, feeling the first pass of the plucking threads, he started from the chair with an unexpected

 "Jesus, Mary and Joseph"

He endured the rest of the ordeal without further outburst, which secured him a small round of applause from the girls when he went to pay.

Threading is the least of it on the eyebrow front: you can get extra hair put in, or fake it with a bit of delicate tattoo: it's called microblading. Removal with waxing, plucking or trimming is also possible. I guess there must be In eyebrow shapes and shame-in-the-office if your brows are deemed to be so yesterday. One of the system failures experienced by old men is that the mechanisms for controlling where hair sprouts tend to break-down. Tendrils sprout from the ears and nose and start curling up up and away from the eye-brows. Accordingly I tend to give a rough pass on the eyebrows with my electric hair/beard trimmer [last time in a barber 1997] when my face is before the mirror. If I don't do this, I know I'll get distracted while driving when something grey loops down and waves in my peripheral vision.

As with so many things that are more or less useless - soccer, boy-bands, painting - there is a lot of money to be made from grooming for looks rather than grooming for lice. Look at [the left eyebrow of R] Anastasia Soare, she's the Eyebrow Queen and a billionaire having arrived in the US from Romania without a word of English 30 years ago. Aspirants to that career can get a diploma in Cosmetology. Just make sure it is approved by the Confederation of International Beauty Therapists and Cosmetology (CIBTAC)